The Contrarian

Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power

By: Max Chafkin

Narrated by: Will Damron

A New York Times Notable Book

A shocking and assiduously reported biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial, and hugely influential power broker whose techno-authoritarian worldview is coming to dominate our collective reality

“Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian is much more than a consistently shocking biography of Peter Thiel, the most important investor in tech and a key supporter of the Donald Trump presidency. It’s also a disturbing history of Silicon Valley that will make you reconsider the ideological foundations of America’s relentless engine of creative destruction.”—Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound

Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing count-less aspects of contemporary life, from the technologies that mediate our daily existence to the rise of the far-right effort among some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and Washington to untether the U.S. government from the established constitutional order. But despite his being one of the most important forces behind the tectonic shifts in America’s sociopolitical landscape, no public figure is quite so mysterious.

In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator’s singular life and philosophy, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, including stren-uously backing outsider political candidates, notably a young Senate hopeful named JD Vance and the longshot 2016 presidential contender Donald Trump.

Essential reading for a post-2024 world, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and a deeply insightful portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with peril.

This author hates Thiel

More of a slight at Thiel than informative, this one had a chance to given a different perspective but took a turn into letting politics and bias guide the narrative.

The chess player

Being a huge fan of his Zero to One, I found this book interesting for other reasons.
First it gives a background to Thiels religious and conservative views from his childhood so you can start to understand him.
Then it gives a very interesting perspective for me as a European into US politics and the conservative media world of reality distortion that seems to be a fun game to do at Stanford for people that takes extreme conservative standpoints. Just to identify themselves with something else and build an identity and eventually a career out of it. I know people that are exactly like this and sort of Mensa material, but here they don’t work very well with the rest of society. In the US they seems to flourish and move into power. Very strange, but also very interesting to understand.

My understanding of Thiel after reading this is that he plays simultaneous chess with almost everything he does. Something he loved to do in his teenage years but now with real people, money, companies and politics.

The book is very critical of Thiels work, but it’s well written, almost like a detective story to uncover Thiel, and the voice reader is one of the best. Thus I finished this book in record times.

I do think the book will need an update of the later chapters in a few years as it spends a lot of time with Trump, the Pandemic and Silicon Valley that might be viewed differently in a few years.

Snore fest; Elon Musk’s story is way better.

Well researched and gives nuanced perspectives but even at the end Thiel seems just as distant and puzzling a character as in the beginning. As for the value of his impact on the valley and the world; questionable. Use your credit for Elon’s book by Isaacson instead.

Slightly Biased, Decent Book

Anyone should be able to tell the author is not a fan of Peter Thiel, with that said this is an interesting book. Peter Thiel and others clearly possess alot of influence over certain things, but the author gives the impression that Peter Thiel somehow conspired Covid 19, 911, and the housing crash simply because Thiel and his companies made money off the disasters. I don't believe Thiel has any founded political ideology because he's smart enough to know it's all smoke and mirrors for a greater objective.

book review

He repeated alot of debunked propaganda that has been spread especially about Trump. still a good read